Category: Book Club

I’m woefully behind on posting because life has been busy to an extent that I find hard to capture in words. I’m sitting here on New Year’s Eve, at a coffee shop, delightfully unencumbered by…anything, and finally taking my many notes and thoughts about books I’ve read this year and writing them up.

For August, our Book Club read the terribly popular Project Hail Mary. This book is, at heart, a celebration of the belief that science—applied rigorously, creatively, and with a sense of humor—can solve almost any problem. It is also a quintessential example of Andy Weir’s particular brand of hard science fiction: meticulous technical speculation, nerdy joy in discovery, and a tone that invites the reader to marvel alongside the protagonist. For those of us who grew up as space-admiring/aspiring nerds in the 1980s (myself very much included), the novel is a deeply lovable romp through physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering—even if its emotional and psychological dimensions sometimes feel underdeveloped. As with The Martian and Artemis, Weir’s emphasis on scientific accuracy and problem-solving captures hearts and minds, even when the characters themselves can feel more functional than fully realized.

The story takes place in a near future—close enough that all of the science feels contemporary—where junior high school science teacher Dr. Ryland Grace wakes up alone on the interstellar spacecraft Hail Mary with total amnesia. He soon learns that he is the sole survivor of a three-person crew sent twelve light-years from Earth to the Tau Ceti system on a one-way mission to save humanity. Earth’s sun has been infected with Astrophage, a microbial life form that feeds on stellar energy and migrates between stars via infrared emissions known as the Petrova Line. As Astrophage dims the Sun, humanity has only a few decades before agricultural collapse, mass famine, and eventual extinction.

Grace’s task is brutally simple in concept and terrifying in execution: determine why Tau Ceti is unaffected by Astrophage and send that information back to Earth via unmanned probes. The Hail Mary itself is a sacrifice ship—there is not enough fuel for a return journey—and the novel alternates between Grace’s present-day struggle to survive and his gradually returning memories of how he became involved in the mission at all.

Those memories introduce Eva Stratt, arguably one of the most interesting characters in the book. As the UN-appointed director of Project Hail Mary, Stratt is granted total authority and legal immunity, and she uses it without hesitation. Her moral calculus is chilling but compelling: conscription of unwilling experts, international coercion, and even the nuclear bombing of Antarctic ice shelves are all justified if they buy humanity more time. Stratt is not portrayed as cruel, but as ruthlessly pragmatic—someone who accepts the moral cost of survival without flinching. In contrast, Grace’s role in these flashbacks highlights one of his central flaws: his passivity. He enables Stratt’s choices through cooperation and intellectual brilliance, while systematically turning a blind eye to his personal responsibility for their ethical consequences.

At Tau Ceti, the novel truly comes alive when Grace encounters an alien spacecraft—the Blip-A—and its sole surviving pilot, a spider-like Eridian engineer Grace names Rocky. Rocky is easily the most interesting character in the book. Sightless, reliant on sonar, encased in mineral armor, and breathing an ammonia-rich atmosphere, Rocky is both profoundly alien and instantly relatable. His intelligence, perfect memory, extraordinary engineering skill, and deeply ingrained sense of cooperation make him a natural counterpart to Grace. Where Grace improvises and theorizes, Rocky builds. Where Grace jokes to deflect anxiety, Rocky responds with earnest curiosity. Their growing friendship—built through painstaking communication, shared scientific puzzles, and genuine affection—is the emotional core of the novel.

Rocky is on a parallel mission: Astrophage threatens his home system, 40 Eridani, just as it threatens Earth. Together, Grace and Rocky investigate Tau Ceti’s Petrova Line and the planet Adrian, narrowly surviving catastrophic accidents and even exposing themselves to each other’s lethal atmospheres in acts of mutual sacrifice. These scenes underscore one of the book’s strongest themes: cooperation across difference as a survival strategy, not just for individuals, but for entire species.

Grace’s recovered memories reveal the final, damning truth about his own character. After the original crew members—Martin DuBois and Annie Shapiro—are killed in an accident, Stratt forces Grace onto the mission against his will. When he refuses to volunteer, she drugs him with an amnesia-inducing agent and has him loaded onto the ship unconscious. Grace’s shame over this cowardice haunts him in the present timeline, particularly as his actions in space repeatedly demonstrate extraordinary courage, ingenuity, and self-sacrifice.

The ultimate scientific breakthrough—the discovery of Astrophage’s natural predator, Taumoeba, and the engineering of a nitrogen-resistant strain capable of saving both human and Eridian stars—perfectly encapsulates Weir’s thesis: complex, existential problems can be solved through persistence, experimentation, and collaboration. Yet the emotional resolution is more ambiguous. When Grace realizes that his solution may have stranded Rocky, he chooses to abandon his own chance at survival to save his friend. It is the bravest decision he makes in the entire novel—and one that finally feels unambiguous, indicating he has grown through the harrowing experience and friendship he built.

The novel ends with Grace living on Erid, teaching science to young Eridians—a full-circle return to the role that once gave him joy. Earth, we learn, has been saved; the Sun has recovered. But the state of humanity itself remains unresolved. The mission took nearly the entire window before agricultural collapse, and Grace’s choice not to return conveniently spares him from confronting both his earlier cowardice and his complicity in Stratt’s morally catastrophic decisions. In that sense, the ending feels emotionally evasive, even as it is narratively satisfying.

Ultimately, I loved Project Hail Mary. As hard science fiction, it is enormously fun, generous to its readers, and infused with genuine wonder. But I also wished for more: more confrontation, more internal reckoning, and a deeper evolution of Grace as a character. He begins and ends the story in essentially the same emotional place—defined by teaching, avoidance, and intellectual problem-solving—while the most compelling moral and emotional arcs belong to Rocky and Stratt. It’s an incredibly fun book, but one that hints at richer counter-narratives it never fully explores.

For July’s book club, we read The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History by Erik Durschmied. The book explores how seemingly small, unpredictable events often involving chance, error, or even stupidity, drastically altered the course of major historical events. The book argues that battles and conflicts are not solely decided by the brilliance of generals or the strength of armies, but are also were significantly influenced by what Durschmied calls the “hinge factor”. 

While military history is in no way my typical fare, I enjoyed this book. Each chapter is in a sense standalone with all the pay off at the end when he walks through the what could have been if not for the “hinge factor”. What is probably least enjoyable about it is the lack of a takeaway chapter to chapter and the lack of value for human life.

If there are themes you can draw it is that unexpected factors, such as bad weather, miscommunication, or individual errors are far too often the reason why glory was attained…NOT the skills or lack thereof. Durschmied examines battles from the Trojan War to the Gulf War, showcasing how the hinge factor played a role in each. 

What I enjoyed most was the challenge of traditional military narratives. By emphasizing the impact of chance and error, the book challenges the perception that military victories are solely the result of strategic brilliance. There is no consistent theme from the battles he selects: in some cases indecision saves the day, and in others decisiveness wins. The book is written in an engaging style, each chapter standing on its own, and what it lacks in greater context historically is something I found I wanted to follow up upon (lots of Wikipedia surfing and even a Great Courses set of follow ups to learn more). 

The most interesting examples of battles that were subject to “the Hinge factor” included:

• The Battle of Agincourt: The muddy battlefield, a result of bad weather, hampered the French knights’ mobility, contributing to their defeat by the English archers
• The Battle of Waterloo: Napoleon’s failure to secure victory was partly attributed to the lack of nails for spiking cannons, preventing his artillery from being effective against Wellington’s forces
• The Battle of Balaclava: The disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade was the result of a poorly worded order, highlighting the dangers of miscommunication and stubbornness
• The Battle of Tannenberg: A slap in the face of a Russian officer by a German officer years before the battle indirectly influenced the outcome of the battle
• The Battle of Tanga:  A swarm of angry bees caused the British forces to panic and retreat, demonstrating the impact of unexpected natural events.

I won’t say I’ll become an avid reader of military history, but this was a unique foray into the topic and I enjoyed it.

Frances “Frankie” McGraw is a young woman from a privileged background raised on California’s idyllic Coronado Island. At the tender age of 22 she’s told “women can be heroes too” and that idea changes her life. In the world she inhabits, she’d never considered there could be a different path to life than marriage. Most of what she has been exposed to is women who raise children and spend their spare time in the country club. Her desire to earn the respect of her parents and follow her beloved brother into a warzone leads to her (rashly) signing up to the Army Nursing Corp. It isn’t a decision that is welcomed by her parents. They are horrified–they do not want for her war and bravery. That is for their son to do, not their daughter, but the die has been cast, and it cannot be undone.

Frankie, like many of the troops sent to fight, is little more than a child when she arrives in Vietnam a few short weeks later. While she apparently has a nursing degree, she is inexperienced and totally unprepared for the realities of war–she cannot even start an IV. Frankie is thrown into her first MASCAL (mass casualty incident) pretty much immediately and is soon questioning whether or not she’s cut out for the job. 

Frankie does make it through however mostly by builds strong bonds with the women she’s serving with. Thanks to their support and guidance, Frankie finds her place and becomes resolute in her mission to do some good, to bring comfort to the injured and dying, and to help the Vietnamese people caught in the middle of the conflict.

Kristin Hannah paints vivid images of war. The operating room, the injuries she describes, the villages and atrocities…each are at times horrific. Against the backdrop of war, Hannah manages to depict lighter moments too; the camaraderie between the women, the celebrations when people finished a tour and that unbreakable bond between the people who were there. Those ‘lighter’ moments never felt too jarring, it’s a reality of war and even during those moments of “downtime” the threat of danger was still present.

I found that the story seemed to happen to Frankie while she was in Vietnam–she managed to survive without really growing. And maybe that is inevitable for a character going through a crucible. She was poorly trained and in a desperately risky situation, and yet, she survives and improves as a nurse. She falls in love multiple times, and while tragedies occur, she lives, she loves again, and she continues in some sense to bumble through her experiences making similar mistakes over and over again. It is really only in part two, when Frankie returns home, that she begins to learn the lessons from her time in the war.

Frankie is in no way prepared for the reception awaiting her at home, and maybe it is that rude awakening that finally forces her to confront reality. It’s well documented that those returning from Vietnam were treated as pariahs; they were labelled ‘baby killers’ and were spat at for their service. Many were left with life changing injuries, struggling with PTSD, yet they were shunned and left with little support. The learning for me was that for women like Frankie who served, the military itself gave them nowhere to turn to. “They weren’t there” was the refrain every time Frankie sought support.

Women who served in the war had seen many of the same horrors, they’d lost people they loved, suffered injuries, and been left traumatized, found themselves written out of history, their service erased. For women like Frankie, there was nowhere to turn to, and no place where they belonged, and in many ways I feel that injustice is what Hannah is attempting to rectify in this novel.

Frankie’s reintegration into ‘normal life’ is in some sense more distressing than her time in Vietnam. It’s like watching someone slowly drown. She makes some bad decisions, can be frustratingly naive, and isn’t always easy to like, but it’s clear how much pain she’s in and how alone she feels. Despite how bad her decision making and luck seem to be, Frankie continues to love, show empathy, and find the ability to forgive others, which occasionally struck me as deeply unlikely.

Despite some of the frustrations with Frankie’s personality and journey, The Women was an enjoyable read. It’s a powerful story about a distressing period in history – Hannah does not shy away from the crimes committed and the uncomfortable truths about what America did. At the heart of the novel is a story of humanity, telling the tale of the heroic women who made huge sacrifices for their country.

Hannah put significant time and research into this book, maybe to the detriment of the character development of her protagonist, but certainly for this history-loving individual, I enjoyed reading an alternate view of the war.

For April’s Book Club we read Semiosis by Sue Burke. I really enjoyed this novel. We have been alternating between fiction and non-fiction this year, and I thought this novel (Ms. Burke’s first) was well-researched across botany, physics, psychology, and most-importantly self-consistent with the dynamics she created even though there were unexplained elements of the societal rifts that I would have loved to see explored more deeply.

On its face Semiosis is a First Contact-Whodunnit-mashup following the story of human refugees from Earth colonizing a planet which they name Pax. The compact they create is one that encourages peace, valuing life and equality, but the struggles of the novel do not enable these noble edicts to persist for long. Intriguingly, there isn’t one protagonist in this novel, or one antagonist. Initially at least you are rooting for the human colony as they wrestle with the planet’s flora and fauna.

Burke evokes an ecology that is alien but familiar with an inventive population of predators and prey: vicious ground-eagles, giant toxic slugs and the fun, easily domesticated fippokats. As the generations on the planet evolve, the slow and stealthy ways of the plants are realized. These are not the flora and fauna of Earth with millennia of additional evolution. These plants can nourish and support the humans or poison and attack them. Plants which have learned over millennia how to domesticate and recruit the animal-life of the planet for their ends. They too are colonists, engaged in turf wars which can turn vicious.

Humans have to take sides determining who to ally with in the plant wars. Octavo the botanist is the first to realize the compromises involved in survival: “We wanted (to) find a happy niche in another ecology. Instead we found a battlefield.”

But the battles aren’t limited to humans and plants. As the generations evolve and adapt to the planet, they increasingly rebel and we go from plants attacking humans to humans attacking one another. This part of the novel could have benefited from more psychological development. The way the community evolves into aggression from such an extreme initial commitment to peace and equality in just one generation is hard to imagine, but there is a strong undercurrent of control, manipulation, and dishonesty, which make the children determine that to survive they must move past the initial generation and their false compact of hope and peace.

As interesting as the humans and their generational evolution is, the most fascinating character is the giant bamboo plant that comes to dominate the lives of the colony from generation 2 onward. So crucial is it to the humans’ survival, they name it after an early colonist: Stevland. In return for their ‘gift-centers’ or latrines and their irrigation labour, it provides an array of fruit and plant tools.

As is the case on Pax, Stevland can alter human physiology and behavior by way of chemicals. It communicates with colonists, and earns its own passages of narration. Initially Stevland’ s voice is clinical, arrogant, and dry. Think Hal the computer-plant, “With the burn of light comes glucose to create starch, cellulose, lipids, proteins, everything I want… In joy, I grow leaves, branches, culms, stems, shoots, and roots of all types. Water flows through the repaired foreigners’ pipes like veins in leaves, freeing me from rains and seasons so I may develop at will.”

I found this voice disturbing at first, with its insistent ‘I’. But that monstrous ego grows on you. Stevland has I would argue the most interesting character arc where ‘he’ faces crises and changes. When a human ‘moderator’ scathingly advises him to grow a sense of humour, he takes it literally. By year 107, its ‘humour root’ enables ice-breaking jokes and sarcasm, which makes his initial interactions with Sylvia and Tatiana almost unrecognizeable. During one tense passage, Stevland communicates with surrounding lesser plants:

‘”Pests.” “Bad.” “Bad.” “Bad.” “Bad.” “Bad.” “Bad.”, they answer one by one. My humour root observes that they have little to say but are talkative nonetheless. I am glad I grew the humour root. I can endure unpleasant situations better.’

Moral ambiguity, aggression, tribalism, and peace are found throughout the novel, but I was particularly struck by Stevland’s journey on this. He is arguably the novel’s most cunning and manipulative antagonist: a plant that out-thinks humans and knows it is better. Stevland the bamboo is initially an enemy who domesticates the humans to their greatest ally trying to defend and protect them, while still having his own agenda and objectives.

Despite the colonists’ quest for Pax, this novel is punctuated by violence, murder, and war, but even with that the novel maintains a strong sense of hope. It’s neither dystopian, nor utopian, but as complex as the business of life. The community’s idealism energizes the narrative as they struggle with the messiness of both human nature and alien beings. First Contact isn’t one breathless moment but a challenge that unfolds over decades, much like the relationships explored. Unpredictable, urgent, occasionally bloody, the story is page-turning with characters and themes that embed themselves deeply in one’s consciousness. I highly recommend even if you aren’t a sci-fi person.

For Book Club in March we read Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell. It was an interesting narrative, picking up on themes from his original book, the Tipping Point, but updating it to cover the Opioid Epidemic, Medicare fraud, teenage suicide, bank robberies and a slew of other maladies that have infected society.

While I deeply prefer to get my scientific research from peer-reviewed journals, Gladwell has a way of creating mass appeal on topics, and assuming it is done to invite learning, inquiry, and debate, I’m for it. Far too many narratives are seeking to tell folks who to blame for troubles in life, and I find those kinds of books appalling.  

Fundamentally, Gladwell tries to imply causality from data he cherry picks out of various stories, and sometimes he may have a grain of truth in there, but the research is not particularly thorough. I found in a pulp fiction sort of way that the novel was eminently readable. I found nuggets and factoids about our collegiate admissions processes and the Opioid Epidemic fascinating, and I’m not at all sorry I read the book, but I would have loved a more detailed and thorough analysis so that the conclusions and insights would have more weight.

Anyway, it was a quick read and won’t disappoint in giving you dinner table trivia to discuss for fun debates with friends, but there are definitely better researched books out there.

For book club in February we took a total left turn and read a science fiction novel written by a friend of one of our club members. The novel, Deus v. Machina written by Dave Cullen is clearly part of a new series based on a private investigator, Cody Stockton, in the near future (2045). It was fun to have a book club discussion in support of a new author, and I found the book genuinely engaging (even my kiddos enjoyed it, stealing it from my nightstand and reading it in just a few nights on their own).

Without giving too much away, the novel has a backstory that humanity had given over operations of the planet to AI systems, the AI then annihilated more than 10% of the population, an uprising against the AI (referred to as the AI War in the novel) occurred, and eventually humanity won, shutting down the AI system, and returning to human rule. Because of this the society seems very close to current day technology (as if we “undid” many of the areas where AI is starting to profoundly change business and political decisions), and there are serious concerns around equality and wealth distrubution (much like our current society). Due to these challenges, the society leaders are contemplating reinstating the AI systems to help manage society, and that backdrop leads to many of the challenges within the novel.

I personally found this backstory requires a prequel I want to read. Not having more detail about it makes it hard to understand why certain technology is still so prevalent 20 years from today, and also why there is such hatred and fear of AI. It also made me question the resurgance of faith in 2045 when we see so many people moving away from faith in modern society. I think that novel will be very interesting. That being said this novel focuses on Cody Stockton, a private investigator in Las Vegas in the year 2045, and his investigation of an accident that he quickly realizes is a murder involving a dangerous Satanic cult.

For a first novel, being willing to take AI, God, and Satan in fewer than 300 pages is lofty! While many sci-fi novels touch on religion, few do it without creating a divergent world and religion. Mr. Cullen brings Jesus to Earth, and pits faith directly against AI. I can poke at anachronisms that were unexplained (USB wall plugs for phones, or numeric passwords, when clearly these things will be wildly different in 2030 let alone 2045), but the narrative between Cody and his girlfriend, as well as Father Briggs around faith, and the challenges that make Cody a believer by the end of the novel are the beauty of the story.

I look forward to a prequel that explains the AI war, the state of technology in 2045, and more of Cody’s evolution as an individual.

For Book Club in January we returned to more of a “business book” theme and read Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure by Timothy Hartford. This book was a fast and fun read (good historical references and story-telling, though maybe fewer conclusions for a reader to take away, which was less trite, but likely more realistic).

Adapt was written in 2012, and while the historical references are still relevant, many of those stories seemed a bit aged given current events. Mr. Hartford walks through changes in military decision making, budgeting and autonomy that led to positive outcomes in region-specific campaigns in Iraq vs. the command and control approaches of the pre-Petraeus regime, as well as the culture of innovation and rapid experimentation that the most successful companies at the time: Google, Facebook, etc. were actively pursuing. Fast forward 10 years and there are no more 20% projects at Google, and many of the free-wheeling innovation projects have been descoped and defunded in an environment of layoffs, and strategic growth initiatives.

And maybe that is the point in some ways: adapt or die. A key nugget I took away was a story early in the book. Mr. Hartford uses The Toaster Project to illustrate the interdependence in the supply chain as well as the vast complexity of manufacturing even simple components in the modern world.  Basically one man tried to build a toaster from scratch and realized the insane levels of complexity required to produce a heating element, the plastic casing, etc. The point of the story is that our modern world is stunningly complex, but we are so engulfed in this complexity that we take it for granted. We are blind to it. We overestimate the impact any one person or leader can have because we fail to see how complex the problems are that current leaders face.

Because the system we live in is far too complex for any one person to understand, even experts in a particular area aren’t as insightful as you might expect because of the interrelatedness of things with many areas about which they know nothing. He uses ample research across many expert groups (analysts, hedge fund managers, etc.) whose expertise did not beat general market averages or predict outcomes better than non-expert groups.

His conclusion is the reason companies don’t stay at the top is often because they were relying on factors beyond their control to achieve their success. When those external factors change good management cannot sustain growth. One has to keep innovating, keep looking at the signals of success, and be tolerant to failure, rather than assume the people or initial thesis will persist. He calls that inability for people to continue to innovate once they achieve success survivorship bias.

So how do you avoid survivorship bias? You have to immerse yourself not just in your success, but you have to see all the failures that led to the eventual success, and you can never stop seeding new innovation. Optimizing cost models works well when everything is growing, but when markets contract, you need to evolve. Evolution strikes a balance between discovering the new and exploiting the familiar. The evolutionary mix of small steps and occasional wild gambles is the best possible way to search for solutions. Evolution produces ongoing “works for now” solutions and then builds upon those ideas.

What kills innovation: overthinking your ability to project perfection. See earlier comments about complexity of our modern era. Those who iterate quickly on many ideas, analyze the data to understand the successes, weed out the failures, and keep moving win.

It was a great discussion at book club, and a good break from the current rhetoric to remember that there are domains where brilliant people can drive impact and innovate. Some of the best companies of our modern era came from previous downturns and market contractions. I am excited to see what new innovative companies will spring up with AI tooling and the available talent pool. I would love to see Mr. Hartford do a revision of this book and see if his thoughts around decision modeling and analysis change given modern AI. It would be a fascinating read.

I cannot believe how far behind I am in posting. As usual, the end of year was busy. For November’s book club we read The Night Watch by Jayne Ann Phillips. I knew it was a historical fiction novel based on the aftermath of the Civil War in America, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, so I assumed it would gripping and meaty. What I did not expect was the lyrical, almost dream-like quality of the writing. The lack of punctuation made following the prose difficult at first, but the characters were intriguing and uniquely voiced so eventually my brain could map who was “speaking” and follow the story.

What I found most brilliant about this story was the inversion in common tropes. One might assume a story in the post-Civil War era framed in a mental asylum would be part Red Badge of Courage and part One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but in fact the war scenes detail brutality measured with honor, brotherhood, and purpose, and the asylum seems more like a modern day health resort than a mental institution (aside: the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the book really did exist as did Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride it’s founder. Dr. Kirkbride was a physician who advocated for compassion in treatment of the mentally ill and helped many families heal after the Civil War.)

The scenes of horror in this novel were counternarratives–stories often skipped in epic novels, those of domestic violence, rape, child abuse, and abandonment. This is a novel that tells what happened to the women and the children left behind when the men went away to war, and it is heart wrenching, but speaks of community, strength, and healing.

I found the characters in the novel complex, the weaving of history with fiction beautifully executed, and the counternarrative to be brilliant. It is not a quick or easy read, and will absolutely require you to engage your mind in the interwoven tales between timelines, characters, and locations, but if you are interested in reading a poetic account of bravery, love, magical realism, and hope despite the odds, and to learn a little bit more about the Civil War than what happened on the battle fields, this book will not disappoint.

For October, we read The Ministry of Time, a debut novel by Kaliane Bradley. While most people in our club liked at least some part of the book, the consensus was not unanimous. The book centers on a top-secret project where figures from the past have been rescued from certain death in their own time periods and transported to the future. At the beginning the narrator, a civil servant of Cambodian-English heritage, has the opportunity to interview for a prestigious role in a new and top-secret branch of the government. She decides to take the role and becomes the bridge (a roommate, companion and observer) of Commander Gore, an explorer who historically died on a failed expedition to the Arctic during the Victorian era.

Right off the bat, the narrator waves aside the science of HOW time travel was invented/discovered by the British government for the formation of the Ministry of Time, and that of course annoyed me. I would have loved to see a bit of due diligence invested in the science here. Still Commander Graham Gore was a real person and it seems the author did do her research on him (as well as for the other “expats” described in the novel). I would have happily read a whole story centered on their adjustment to the modern era. Where they grappled with concepts that were totally unfamiliar and where they found joy was a wonderful thought experiment, and is a testament to the creativity of Ms. Bradley. There are so many funny and engaging moments, the wonder and occasional disdain that they found in modern technology and morays was hilarious and insightful.

In this section, a beautiful if hard-to-imagine relationship between the narrator and Commander Gore spawns. It is written with tension and allure, creating a backstory that seems to explain why a man who comes from an era where people who were not of British or at least European descent were clearly not valued, might fall in love with a person of mixed-Ethnicity despite himself. While forced in places, and maybe indicative of feelings of misbelonging from the author herself, it does describe a mutual love affair bordering on obsession. Ms. Bradley’s writing style comes across in this section with some expressive phrases, “humor can slide ideas under the door” and “you can’t trauma-proof life, and you can’t hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others.” There are others which feel a bit over-the-top, but I love poetry, so I found her phrases often lingered in my head.

I struggled with the end of the novel because the science and the story did not progress logically to me. I did not like the inconsistency in tone from start to finish (one so charming, one so jarring and painful). I did not feel it was true to human nature that a love affair would end the way it did (if one truly felt so strongly, then hate and not indifference would be more logical). Mostly though I did not find the science tolerable (even the narrator’s own ark violates the notion of a time paradox).

It was like a dystopian novel was jammed in at the end of what generally felt like a historical romance. I can step back and say “the author decided to engage in a thought experiment about bringing a British commander forward from the Victorian era, and what the future would have looked like if that form of British “exceptionalism” had been allowed to carry forward through the 21st century–the inevitable impact to other nations.” But of course that isn’t what happened, and while the world is certainly not fair and equal among nations, the notion that one country could exist simply for the exploit of another would be shunned world wide in our era.

Again, I don’t want to seem naive that we live in a time of equality, and every piece of fiction is a thought experiment one either resonates with or does not. We do see resource exploitation more heavily in industrialized nations, but also increased consciousness and a desire to reduce consumption. Like many debut novels it felt like her own personal struggles around being of mixed heritage where others couldn’t fully see her, and maybe her guilt over being someone who could “blend in” making her more compliant than others to inequality in systems was where she was trying to go with the book. These were all potentially powerful reflections that could have been written in without the non-scientific sci-fi thriller portion, but I felt that the way she took characters who were so vibrant in the beginning of the novel and reduced them to caricatures by the end to make her point made the novel much less compelling.

All in all I was glad I read it, but it felt like it was two novels mashed together, and the first one was far more creative.

For Book Club in September, Rachael helped select our book, and Chip Conley’s Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age was the winner.

Chip Conley is the founder of The Modern Elder Academy, and at times the book feels a bit like lead gen for that organization, but generally he manages to maintain a call to action and not devolve into an ad campaign. Mr. Conley was early at AirBnB where he was considered their “wise elder” since before that he had been a boutique hoteliere. The book starts with his personal midlife crisis, and evolves into a treatise on why midlife is a time to savor wisdom, self-knowledge, and joy. 

The midlife crisis is the butt of so many jokes because the stastics are real: suicide, mental health crises, illness, loss of friends, spouses, jobs, parents, financial stress, and so much more often hits in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. The book tries to reframe our thinking about the natural transition of midlife not as a crisis, but as “a chrysalis—a time when something profound awakens in us, where we shed our skin, spread our wings, and pollinate our wisdom to the world.”

Of the 12 reasons he lists for why life gets better with age, two really resonated with me:

1. My appearance doesn’t define me

I grew up performing (dancing and singing), and appearance was critical to landing a part (often more important than my skill). Then when I entered engineering, my appearance was also defining and not in a good way. I didn’t “look” the part, and I got to experience all the cliche moments one might predict: being propositioned, asked if I could get folks coffee when I was actually teaching the class, etc.

As I get older, appearance matters less to me: how others perceive me and how I judge myself. I am just grateful to be able to move, dance, run, sing, and HOW I do it matters so much less than the fact that I still can. Whether I match someone’s mental model of an engineer or not is their problem. What matters to me now is helping other people who aren’t the norm find their place in this profession because ultimately that will lead to better solutions and systems. Getting through the shock of being an outlier requires a mental and emotional energy beyond just the day-to-day effort of investing in one’s real work: I want to help people who are experiencing that weather the challenges and reassure them that people care a whole lot less than they think they do.

2. Letting go of our emotional baggage, mindsets, and obligations that no longer serve us

Much like the above, there are modes of operation that get you to a certain point in your career and life journey, but if you are not willing to find your reason and seek a greater purpose than your own success, you likely won’t be very happy. Whether that is music, family, religion, or community, much of the joy of being in this life phase is saying “I have enough” and “I am enough.” We push so hard to prove ourselves through school, landing a job, getting the next promotion, finding our partners, building our families, etc. At some point we have to transition to a place of enjoyment in what we have, and not just the next mountain we are seeking to climb: this is your life! It is a gift to not need someone else to validate you. To see feedback as a signal of how people are perceiving you, and choose to adapt your behavior if they are important to you, but not to take it personally. Being able to step back from that baggage is absolutely a gift of experience, self-assurance, and wisdom.

There are definitely some good nuggets in this book, and getting to share it at Book Club with so many of my former colleagues making major life changes (retirement, entrepreneurship, empty-nesting, managing health and wellness scares, etc.) led to deeply meaningful conversations. If you are going through a transition and feeling like you are the only one: you aren’t alone, and maybe this is a good book to pick up. Happy reading!